Nicaragua Sacrifices Hamlets To War Effort

Thousands Of Peasants Moved

March 19, 1985|By John Lantigua, Special to The Tribune.

PANTASMA, NICARAGUA — Tens of thousands of peasants are being moved by the government from their farms in isolated sectors of the northern Nicaraguan mountains, zones where until now rebels have been able to find food, information and recruits. Celestino Chavarria, 60, his wife and his 11 children were moved off their small farm in a remote area called Los Cedros, in Jinotega Province, 120 miles north of Managua, by soldiers who told him there soon would be combat there.

``They told us it was a war zone,`` Chavarria said in a resettlement camp in the nearby village of Pantasma. ``They weren`t forcing us to leave, but they said they wouldn`t be responsible for us if we didn`t go.``

Nicaraguan government and foreign diplomatic sources have said the ruling Sandinistas are concerned about new aid for the contra rebels from the United States and are about to undertake a major offensive against them.

Chavarria, who has seen heavy artillery rounds land near his home in the past, decided to get out, as did all the farmers in the rugged hills around him, he said.

The Chavarrias are one of 7,000 families that the government has announced it will move in the five northern provinces that are the principal theater of the 3-year-old rebel conflict.

More than 35,000 people will be moved, for the most part farmers whose tattered clothing, ramshackle housing and illiteracy mark the distance they have remained from the social and economic programs of the government.

The military, in effect, is creating free-fire zones to combat the rebels, and the farmers said they were told to move for their own safety. But some officers admit the army also wants to relocate the mountain families because they have provided logistical support for the rebels, some

voluntarily.

``While those isolated hamlets exist, the contras arrive and the peasant has to give him food to eat,`` said Capt. Adolfo Chamorro, army chief of staff for the five northern provinces. ``It makes it easy for the contras to continue the type of war they are fighting.``

Chavarria said he and other farmers from the Los Cedros area were given more than two weeks` notice to get out, but farm families from the hills around San Juan de Limay, in Esteli Province, complained to journalists that they were forced to abandon their homes with only 24 hours` notice.

They said soldiers hurried them out of their houses and smashed their red tile roofs and then, in some cases, burned the structures to the ground, apparently so rebels could not use them. Peasants said that they were forced to leave behind personal belongings and food and that they also lost such unharvested crops as coffee.

The relocated families are living in temporary housing of varying quality, some in sound houses made of concrete slabs, others in ramshackle lean-tos of roofing material. Many families have their belongings shoved into old coffee sacks waiting for another move.

The evacuations recalled a similar Sandinista move early in 1982, when tens of thousands of Nicaraguan Indians were moved off their ancestral lands near the Honduran border and into resettlement camps after attacks by Indian rebels based in Honduras. The forced evacuations and the burning of entire villages afterward led thousands of Indians to flee the country; some eventually joined the rebels.

The farmers from Los Cedros said the rebels have passed through their hills and admitted they had sold food to the contras, just as they had to the government troops.

``I have to be afraid of both sides, because they both carry guns,`` one Los Cedros farmer said. The farmers also said that at least one young man from their area was thought to be fighting with the rebels.

The official Sandinista newspaper, Barricada, last week described the resettlement of the farmers as the ``rescue of thousands of peasants from the isolation that allowed the counter-revolutionaries to use them.``

``Gathering (the peasants) into groups . . . we can make them see what . . . is the policy of the Sandinista revolution towards the peasantry as regards production, health and education,`` Capt. Chamorro said.

Meanwhile, Jaime Wheelock, minister for agrarian reform, was stressing that while traditional farmers were using 48 percent of the country`s land to raise only 26 percent of the crops, more ``technified`` farmers were producing more, apparently a reference to Sandinista-organized state farms and cooperatives. The relocation of the independent farmers and statements like Wheelock`s have led critics of the Sandinistas to charge once again that the government wants to eliminate private enterprise, to ``communize`` Nicaragua, as rebel leaders have claimed.

As for Chavarria and his family, they were to be moved along with their Los Cedros neighbors to a large state-owned hacienda where they will live together but farm individual plots of land. ``I don`t know how much we are going to be given, but they say we will receive land,`` Chavarria said.

Chamorro said that the farm families would benefit from government health and education programs but that they also would be encouraged to form a militia to protect their new lands, a form of military involvement many independent farmers have resisted.